Winning Drawing In ‘Draw Muhammad’ Contest May End Up On DC Metro Trains

05.28.2015 | Surge Wire |

The winning cartoon from the “Draw Muhammad” event that saw two terrorists gunned down by police earlier this month in Texas may soon make its way to advertisements on public transportation in Washington, D.C.

The American Freedom Defense Initiative, the group that organized the event, announced Tuesday in a post on Breitbart.com that it submitted an ad campaign to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to run on buses and in train stations around the city.

“Drawing Muhammad is not illegal under American law, but only under Islamic law. Violence that arises over the cartoons is solely the responsibility of the Islamic jihadists who perpetrate it,” Pamela Geller, president of the AFDI said in a statement.

“Either America will stand now against attempts to suppress the freedom of speech by violence, or will submit and give the violent the signal that we can be silenced by threats and murder. We cannot submit to the assassin’s veto.”

Dan Stessel, a spokesman for WMATA, told NBC4 Washington that the ad is going through the same process as any other ad that is submitted, but the ad “has not yet been approved for our system.”

WMATA officials did not respond when TheDCNF inquired if the ad had been approved Thursday.

According to WMATA guidelines, its advertising venues constitute a designated public forum, which means it can place few restrictions on speech, but “reasonable time, place and manner restrictions are acceptable.”

The rejection of advertising requests “must be necessary to serve a compelling state interest and narrowly drawn to achieve that end,” their guidelines read.

The drawing that won the contest, and will be featured in the ad campaign, shows a bearded man wearing a turban and holding a sword who says, “you can’t draw me.”

A voice bubble coming from the hand drawing the character replies, “That’s why I draw you.”

The AFDI, which describes itself as a “human rights advocacy group,” ran ads on D.C. public transportation last year that showed Nazi leader Adolph Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini, whom the ad described as Hitler’s “staunch ally, the leader of the Muslim world.”

Next to the picture, the ad read, “Islamic Jew-Hatred: It’s In The Quran.”

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